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amunicio

They should buy Sony. It would give them:

- Universal Studios

- PlayStation (aka a big foothold in the living room) and some of the most creative game studios

- Awesome displays (TVs)

- Bigger footprint in the consumer electronics market

- ... and most important of all the best camera sensors in the market (including camera phone sensors).

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The console market is minuscule compared to the phone market.

Sony has only sold 75 million PS4's since it was released (https://www.businessinsider.com/ps4-playstation-4-lifetime-s...). Apple sells almost that many iPhones in a good quarter.

TVs are big and bulky and have something like an 8 year replacement cycle.

82m as of today: https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/31/playstation-4-sales-pass-...

5 years to sell 82 million?

Apple’s Watch business will probably do better than that 5 years from introduction. It’s probably more profitable.

But it would be 82 million Apple TVs overnight after a software upgrade.

Not to mention PlayStation Vue could become Apple Vue.

And PS Vue would only be of use in the US.

At the end of the day, PS Vue doesn’t offer anything compelling enough to acquire. A few subscribers and a bunch of licensing deals to broadcast TV over the Internet. Apple could get the same deals as Sony, Sling, Directv, Hulu, etc. Cable networks aren’t exactly being stingy about licensing.

There's no way that Apple would allow tvOS to run on unaudited hardware like the PS4.

"TVs are big and bulky and have something like an 8 year replacement cycle."

Exactly. TVs are basically furniture.

I was off - I’ve seen reports of 10 years....

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2017/11/22/ihs-tv-replacemen...

Universal Studios is owned by Comcast [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Pictures

You are correct. My bad, Sony owns Columbia Pictures not Universal.

Again, there is a ZERO chance a Japanese company would allow an American company to take it over for cultural reasons. That won't happen.

Sony is not a Keiretsu. They are fair game.

Consider the other way around. Would Apple want to buy a decades-old consumer electronics company? Sony has been stagnant in my eyes, even before the NKorea hack.

Have you checked the direction of Sony's stock lately?

IMO, This is an invalid, outdated view of Japanese culture.

Japanese companies, even large culturally important brands, get purchased by foreign entities. A controlling stake of Sharp was purchased by Foxconn two years ago, for example.

Sony does not make it's own display panels.

They have been buying LCD panels from Samsung of South Korea in a joint venture:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4344101&page=1

And their new OLED TV is mostly the work of LG Display:

https://www.theverge.com/ces/2017/1/10/14222986/sony-bravia-...

The selling point of Sony TV's is not just the panel but the processing, similarly to how Apple does not make it's own camera sensors, but it does do a lot of it's own procession to optimize your photos.

Yup and music / hollywood content library. It's a match made in heaven but Mr Cook is going to spend 1 trillion on paper stock before he does anything else...

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